im in government class and i need a couple of answers that i cant find in the book???

Question

so i thought i would try here,
1) What is active citizen participation, yea a brief help
2)What is social contract theory, yea Thomas Hobbes helped with it, but what exactly is it?
3)majority rule with minority rights, is this a big leader, and peoples rights, idk..?
4)accomplish common goals...

thanks, but i dont need definitions, if possible, i just need help to know what they are...

ha thanks, i did read it, i just overlook things sometimes, and its hard for me to concentrate on things sometimes, and when you have brothers who dont leave you alone, its hard, so yah..and the accomplished goals, i think that was just saying some goals that have been accomplished, i really dont know, my teacher gave me like 42 words to define...and i found all of those, so its not like i didnt work..right?

Answer 1

Well I strongly suspect that the reason you can't find these in the book is that to do so you need to OPEN it and READ it... but I'll give you some help none the less.

Active Citizen Participation is easy... it means you do something with your life beside sit on your tuchus and watch 24. Voting is the most minimal form of citizen participation in government, and about half of the American Voting Age populace can't be torn away from FRIENDS re-runs long enough to do even that (sigh). Voting though is just the start. Being involved in a political party, joining the military, running for elective office, doing jury duty, becoming a judge, actually going to city council meetings and speaking about issues, even doing pettition drives; writing your Congressmen, Senators, and the President, even blogging, all these things are citizen participation.

A FREE CITIZEN takes part in his or her governement, a SUBJECT does not.

2) This is the biggie. I'm glad you noticed Hobbes name, he is one of the biggies and he started it. John Locke had more to do with how it developed and how it is used in the United States.

Hobbes had lived through the English Civil War, which would be sort of like growing up in Baghdad or Somalia today. He noticed that when people live in situations where there are no rules. life is, as he put it " solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/254050.html

Again, go look at Somalia or Afghanistan.

Now in ancient times Athens had been a democracy, Rome had started out as a Republic, and Venice was a Republic up until Napoleon came in the 1800s. That being said most people of Hobbes day believed in the idea of "The Divine Rights of Kings". This idea was basicly that you did what the King said because God was the person responsible for the King being King, and if you dissed the King then you were dissing God's representative on Earth, and God would get rather annoyed with you for that. The Kings liked this idea for obvious reasons, and the Church was behind it because it gave them power over the King. (The Pope could come out and say "He's not the person God wants to be King of France!" and then people might revolt. ) The idea here is that you, as a citizen, have only the rights that the King (Government) says you can have.

Hobbes however saw it differently. Having lived through a time when the social order broke down, he saw that people were born free. This includes the freedoms to burn, pillage, rape, steal, kill and enslave. The way government works is people, all of whom are born free, come together and agree " We all agree to give up a little of our freedom (the freedom to kill, murder, rape and steal etc. ) So that we can all live in saftey. We will protect each other. We will agree on how to make the rules, we will agree to all live by the same rules, even if we don't like them. " That is, more or less, the social contract. I agree not to steal from you, you agree not to steal from me. We both agree that if someone steals from either one of us the other one will help the one who was stolen from." ("Do not that to another, which thou wouldst not have done to thyself." ) Hobbes liked strong governments because he felt that only a strong government would be tough enough to keep things together and keep everything from falling apart (again). He called the Government "Leviathan" and that is what he named his book on the subject, written in 1651.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes

John Locke took it to the next step.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke

Locke's idea wasn't just that free people gave up rights to the government to form the government, it was that people stayed free and could take those rights back if the government got too big. (As President Ford once said "A government that is big enough to give anything to you is also big enough to take anything from you.")

Locke advocated governmental checks and balances (to keep it from getting to big) and believed that revolution is not only a right but an obligation in some circumstances. These ideas would come to have profound influence on the Constitution of the United States and its Declaration of Independence.

3) Not sure what you are going for here. I can say this. Majority rule vrs Minority Rights is, and always will be, a ballancing act. What do you mean by "is this a big leader"?

4) Huh?

Answer 2

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